In a world of precarious work, cops excepted
Critics say public money needs to be shifted to help community and social workers prevent crime
In a shifting economy where precarious work reigns, the job-for-life is much like an exotic animal: rare, valuable and teetering on the edge of extinction. With a few notable exceptions. Statistics Canada tells us that in 2014, 99 per cent of Canadian police officers worked full-time. By contrast, around half of Ontario workers now work less than 40 hours a week, often juggling two or more jobs to piece together full-time work. In Canada, the average hourly wage for a police officer is $28.22. In Ontario, almost a third of all workers are now making within $4 of the $11.25 minimum wage. The unionization rate for Canadian police officers is 78 per cent, but averages just 30 per cent in other sectors.
Policing is one of the last bastions of long-term job security complete with a good salary and entitlements.
“When issues of police and corrections discipline come up, it has often been in private, and the public has remained uninformed.” CARLO FANELLI RYERSON UNIVERSITY
It is also, critics say, bloated, antiquated and unaccountable.
“I don’t envy the work that some police have to do at all,” says Fred Kaustinen, executive director of the Ontario Association of Police Services Boards. “There does need to be rights and protections. But this idea that we can’t evolve past our silos because we have to carry these existing employees in their current jobs for 30 years, that’s a big obstacle.”
“When issues of police and corrections discipline come up, it has often been in private, and the public has remained uninformed. And this poses a real problem for public trust,” adds Carlo Fanelli, a politics and public administration instructor at Ryerson University.
Which leaves the labour activists in a tight spot: how to champion decent work as a standard for all, while also acknowledging that jobs may sometimes have to go in the name of reform?
That reform, says a December KPMG report, involves shifting to a “community-centric” approach and a halt to unnecessary spending — a suggestion that the powerful Toronto Police Association (TPA), which represents officers, has resisted.
Mike McCormack, president of the TPA, says training-heavy community policing needs more resources, not fewer.
“That is a very resource-intense form of policing,” he says, adding that his officers are fairly compensated for their difficult line of work.
“What we’re doing is a multi-faceted job, and the public has very high expectations.”
While most unions have traditionally supported a progressive agenda centred on social equality, Fanelli notes that police unions have often been the exception, instead pushing a law-and-order agenda that has antagonized the city’s minority communities. None of the province’s police associations are affiliated with the Ontario Federation of Labour, the umbrella group for most mainstream unions.
“I think there’s always been a divide between workers who deliver broader public services and those who might be in a position in power — especially those we link to the forceful arm of the state or government, like police and corrections,” Fanelli says.
Yet police associations have special bargaining power in contract negoti- ations, given their ability to play into fears of public safety and social breakdown. Those bargaining chips are not readily available to most other public-sector workers — even though Kaustinen argues they play just as an important role in crime prevention as police officers.
“The worst thing we can do is invest in enforcement and prisons at the expense of addressing the social systems,” he says.
But while the TPA continues to lobby for budget increases, the broader public sector employees tasked with delivering vital, crime-preventing social services are increasingly precarious. As reported by the Star, almost half of new Ontario public-sector job postings in 2014 were for temporary, seasonal or contract work. Critics say that move, often driven by budget constraints, compromises the quality of front-line social work.
Which is why Rick DeFacendis, a former member of the police service and Humber College’s Police Foundations co-ordinator, says police are still being asked to fill in the gaps.
“If you’re going to design a model with 911as the be-all and end-all to all community-related issues, then you’re going to have a large organization to address those issues. The size of a police organization has to be driven by its mandate.”
If that mandate is to change, Kaustinen says government must seriously invest in the people and services tackling the root causes of crime.
“You have to take a system-wide look at the issue.”